Oracle Blog

Michael Fang's Weblog

Electric Vehicles

Marcos's informative speech about plugin-hybrids and electric vehicles at speakeasy@sun Toastmaster's Club led me to the Electric Auto Association's Rally in Palo Alto in late August, where I witnessed various electric vehicles first hand.

My favorite EV from that Rally was the Tesla Roadster (pictured below). It reminded me of the Lotus Elise.

The Lotus Elise (below)

These two pictures were taken from roughly the same angle. The overall size and shape are similar. The light at the rear wheel arch looks the same. On Tesla Motor's FAQ page, it mentioned: "Lotus Cars is assembling the Tesla Roadster under contract to Tesla Motors. Tesla Motors has also hired Lotus Engineering for certain design and engineering tasks". No wonder!

The Tesla has many attributes that attracted me. First of all, it looks stunning! The look is not only skin deep. Behind the sharp look, it has a zero emmision motor that is capable of pushing the 2-seater from 0 to 60 mph in under 4 seconds, with a top speed of 125 mph and a range of 245 miles.

Now, the negatives. The base price of the car is $98,000. That's more than twice the cost of a Lotus Elise (sticker price was $48,880 for the 2005 model pictured above), and it's not available yet. It's scheduled for delivery in July 2008.

Anyway, I can see potential success for this EV. Even though $100,000 is a lot of money, but there are a lot of people who can afford $100K+ cars, especially for a car that can reach 60 mph in under 4 seconds, which is an acceptable price point for such performance.

I was interested in getting a Tesla, but the 125 mph top speed was a deal breaker. Plus, there's an issue about the battery life and the cost for replacement. I think there's a better place to spend the $100k.

Thanks ST for your comment. I can imagine the lithium ion battery can be expensive to replace. Well, the Tesla will probably be a toy for the rich or the environmentalists who wouldn't think about the maintenance costs :)

Since you are interested in bikes, you might find the Yamaha Lightning E1 or Vectrix ($11,000) interesting, though they cannot compare with your Ducati:

tesla motors is nice and all that, but i can get goss132 for a quarter of that
price. what a great company! love you goss132! what a relief actually.
i'll have more money for clothes, and my sons sports! hope they will sell a bunch
of them in miami!

I live about a mile away from Tesla headquarters in San Carlos, and work only a few blocks away, and so know quite a bit about the tesla cars. you should indeed be reminded of the lotus elise, because the roadster is built on a slightly longer lotus elise chassis. In fact, it is built overseas in the lotus factory for now. in the next year or two, however, they are planning on putting a dedicated production facility in the san francisco bay area.

I have seen many of these plugin-hybrids cars and they are AWSOME! If any of you guys ever need to sell one, I know the company who makes all of the sticker tags and decals for these cars. They are www.GoDecals.net. GoDecals.net's labels are the perfect stickiness to where they will never come off until you want them to. Then they never leave a sticky residue and are easy to peel off when you car is sold. I can't recommend them enough!